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Combining historical, social and regulative analysis, this book builds a compelling critique of 'frontier thinking' as it continues to form our assumptions about social and environmental organisation – in ways that impact not least the present environmental crisis.

This book systematically identifies the ways in which images of nature and society are formed by the historically developed frontier-oriented narratives which have underpinned much Anglo-American and Anglocentric thought. The book confronts these conceptions at large, showing that they never held empirically, and contrasts them with the situation in northern Europe, where diverging assumptions are integral to this day. Through this juxtaposition, this book illustrates not only the pervasiveness of structures of understanding in steering policy but also the varying traditions regarding how understandings of the environment can be formed.

This study highlights how historical thought patterns, formed for very different reasons than exist today, continue to shape our assumptions about nature, the relation between urban and rural areas and our understanding of ourselves in relation to the environment. This book will be of wide interest to a range of academics and students in the fields of geography, anthropology, environmental studies, sociology, political science and development studies, amongst others.

Cover -- Half Title -- Series -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of figures -- List of text boxes -- Acknowledgements -- 1 Aim and scope of the book -- 2 The origins of climate change research and assumptions within the field -- 3 The role of theory and case studies in social science: means to understanding institutions and contextualising instruments -- 4 The complex of issues influencing action on climate change: examples from forestry and multilevel cases -- 5 Why knowledge is not enough: limits to communication and learning -- 6 Why understanding stakeholder participation requires understanding power and institutions -- 7 Understanding environment, society, and scale: why outcomes of the same types of measures are not the same everywhere, and the local level is not only local -- 8 Conclusion: implications of an institutional understanding -- References -- Index.

The Arctic has often been seen as a natural area, or even a "wilderness", where mainly indigenous and subsistence activities have been prominent. Contrary to this, the present volume highlights the very long historical development of resource use systems in northern Europe, across multiple actors and multiple levels, and including varying population groups. The book takes a past-present-future perspective that illustrates the paths to institutional emergence, change or persistence over time. It also illustrates how institutions may themselves drive changes, through a focus on resource use cases in northern Europe. This volume demonstrates that understanding "northern "issues is less about understanding sets of geophysical, climatological or environmental conditions than about understanding social and institutional structures. Understanding these trajectories into the future is seen as a key way of understanding what responses to future change may be likely and what the institutions are that will shape, limit or enable our responses to climate change. This book will be of great use to scholars and graduates in the fields of Arctic and northern-region politics, and to researchers of resource use and climate change with a focus on vulnerability, social vulnerability, adaptation and mitigation.

Climate Change and Flood Risk Management discusses and problematises the integration of adaptation to climate change in flood risk management. The book explores adaptation to climate change in relation to flood risk events in advanced industrial states. It provides examples of how flood risk management, disaster and emergency management, and adaptation to climate change may intersect in a number of European and Canadian cases. Taken together, the studies show that integration of adaptation in flood risk and emergency management may differ strongly - not only with risk, but with a number of ins

Mitigation will not be sufficient for us to avoid climate change and we will need to adapt to its consequences. This book targets the development of adaptation policy in European countries with different relations between central and regional/local government.

Climate change vulnerability assessment is a rapidly developing field. However despite the fact that such major trends as globalization and the changing characteristics of the political and economic governance systems are crucial in shaping a community?s capacity to adapt to climate change these trends are seldom included in assessments. This book addresses this shortcoming by developing a framework for qualitative vulnerability assessment in?multiple impact? studies (of climate change and globalization) and applying this framework to several cases of renewable natural resource use. The book.

The EU Water Framework Directive exerts a major impact on water management structure and aims, and water use activities in the member states. This paper reviews the perceptions of the early WFD implementation in a case study area in southern Sweden. The focus is on the perceptions of both water management and forestry actors, the latter as a potential diffuse source impact on water quality. This study highlights the considerable complexity of reorienting or rescaling governance given the complex existing systems particular to the area, the multi-interpretable early policies on implementation and the complexity of interpreting the regionally-focused WFD approach in the largely locally-focused Swedish system. While the first phase of implementation is now long past, conclusions on the complexity of reorienting systems remain relevant, particularly with regard to non-point sources.

It is only relatively recently that national adaptation strategies have begun to develop measures by which forestry can adapt to climate change; often those measures opt to use a relatively general strategy for coping under conditions of disturbance. Particularly in states using intensive forest management, such as Sweden, this approach marks a departure from current strategies for achieving maximum yield. In other countries, however, where the economic output from forestry is less significant and interests such as biodiversity, local use and tourism, may figure more prominently, the conditions for developing risk-based forest management may be more manifest. This study reviews literature on adaptations in forest management, and analyzes country reports submitted as part of an EU27 project. The study concludes that the diverse prerequisites and policies of states have seldom been reflected in the design of adaptation management actions to date.